Leave The Game Alone

Posted in Uncategorized by Flavor on February 22, 2017

I still can’t get over the proposed changes possibly coming to baseball. Manfred is throwing the word *unilaterally* around and whenever I hear that I get a little nervous. Changing the game against the players wishes is not a road I want to go down…..

Anyway, after he sends out notice (1 year), Manfred is getting rid of the intentional 4 balls walk to first. Now the manager just *4 fingers* the batter over there. Manfred can’t be so dumb as to believe this is going to shave much time off a game. What’s that take, about 30 seconds? And it might happen once a game? I believe he’s doing this just to gauge how much outrage he’s going to have to sidestep when he gets to his larger, stupider, rule change: placing a runner at 2nd base to begin each extra inning.

THAT one had better never fly at the mlb level. I’m not sitting around watching a tightly contested game, often tied in dramatic fashion in the 9th inning, only to watch the commissioner force *Arena Baseball* on us to start the 10th. I’ve never met a single person who is engaged and focused on a ballgame for 9 innings and then all of a sudden gets restless and stressed and has to get out of there because the game hits the 10th. Plopping a freebee runner on second base to start each inning would absolutely ruin the game.

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Agreed, love the headline. There has also been talk about limiting pitching moves, also wrong in my book.

No doubt in my mind that DH contributes to game times too. Besides fact that obviously a real hitter is more difficult out (and will get on base more often) than majority of most pitchers, AL mgrs don’t have to factor in where a pitcher bats in an inning if they want to yank him.

AAU kid story: Last year I coached girls HS, our returning lead rebounder (a junior) and second high scorer had played AAU over the summer for a coach who told her she wouldn’t be that position in college and more likely a small forward or “3”.
So she announced to us in preseason that’s where she wanted to play. Coach mostly let her have her way but our centers were a JV kid and an inexperienced back up. The JV kid almost never scored and in practice the 3 girl pushed her around and in games wouldn’t share the ball. We won the league but were not a happy group and there was a lot of turmoil.

Then one day in practice when I was guarding her, she moved into the post and she threw an elbow at me head high as I tried to get in position to half front and deny pass into her.
I warned her out loud about never doing that to a teammate, but obviously she felt entitled over everyone else to do what she wanted.

MLB’s obsession with going after younger fans is futile. One of the best things MLB is doing lately , which is more productive, is marketing to women. Women are half the population, and it turns out that many enjoy MLB when they give it a chance.

It may sound a little silly, but getting chewing tobacco out of the game helps get more women to watch the sport. They were disgusted by the tobacco-spitting. Players spit a lot anyway, but tobacco juice was especially disgusting.

Lincecum was a fantastic talent and incredibly fun to watch but not without flaws. Inability to focus on holding runners on and that whole weird relationship with his Dad, definition of control freak was just odd.

And for those fans of the bunt, it is still burns me to watch pitchers screw this up. just like fielding your position, this is a fundamental skill that seems so lacking in today’s game. You help yourself and your team by being better at it, no excuses.
You hear all the time they go over this stuff in ST and then what?

Timmy, in his hey-day was phenomenal. I remember days at the yard on which he was slated to start, there was just an electricity in the air around the park that I had never experienced before (outside of playoff games, etc.).

Going back to yesterday and the discussion on how to speed-up the game.

snaark said: But, stop this stepping out of the box nonsense. They still do it, though supposedly there is a strike penalty, I believe, for doing it. Some keep one foot in, and do the splits with the other foot out of the box. Adjusting hat, helmet, jock strap and especially gloves is just out of control. It’s nonsense. Stay in the box and let’s go. Bonds did very little of that Nervous Nellie crap. He stood in there and then raked…

I agree. ENFORCE the fucking rule. Get in the box and stay in the box.

There was discussion on the number of pitching changes. This is the game now. Teams regularly carry 11 or 12 pitches. Pitching has become more specialized, and I do not see that changing. But I will agree with Unca where he was describing the game in Denver that we both attended (where Bochy made a pitching change per batter for 6 straight guys and the Giants blew a 6-2 lead). And I agree – I also told the Colorado folks who I was with that the Giants would lose the game (when they were up 6-2)…and they did.

One thing that I believe would definitely move the game along is for all umps to call the strike zone consistently. Call the damned strike zone as it is described in the rule book! If they did this, there would be less walks. And if the umps cannot get their pea-brains wrapped around this, then fucking have a robot call strikes/balls.olo

Pfffttt…I DO NOT like the fact that MLB can announce intent on a proposed rule one year prior, and then have 100% leeway on whether or not to implement the proposed change. To me, the union (basically, representation of the players’ voices) needs to be part of ANY and ALL rule changes.

Russell Martin came up with a facetious idea for speeding up the game, although Manfred might just take it seriously:

“By no means are intentional walks automatic, until now. Now they are. So they’re speeding up the game,” said Martin. “My thing is, if they really want to speed up the game, then when a guy hits a home run, to speed up the game should a guy, just like in softball, when he hits it, should he just walk to the dugout? It’d be quicker. I’m just wondering, at what point do we just keep the game, the game? Or, how about this calculation: take all the intentional walks that were made in the last couple years and calculate – or maybe just ask to see if they have that information, to see if they really did their homework. Is it really that important to speed up the game (with this rule)? Because how many games did we play last year where we didn’t have one intentional walk? That’s something I’d like to know.”

I mean, I don’t even need to check that info. Four-fingering a guy to first base will absolutely not speed up the game. It doesn’t happen enough to speed up the game. As I said, my suspicion is that he’s trotting this out there because it’s pretty benign and he wants to see what he can get away with before he implements the super crazy shit.

Manfred and some others in the baseball world are obsessed with the fact that kids don’t watch baseball like they used to, and they’re worried baseball fandom will go extinct. Wrong. Lots of folks become baseball fans later in life these days, because of the ability to watch it so much on TV, and the ballparks are better, and as Loo mentioned, some are just there for the social scene, and that’s fine, IMO. They all support the sport with their time and money.
There’s some common sense things that would speed up the pace, like Chi mentioned, enforcing the batters keeping one foot in the batter’s box. Also, as has been mentioned, speed up the replay process a bit.
Manfred needs to chill out a bit. It’s like he’s panicking or something.

It is an age thing somewhat. There are plenty of kids that play and watch baseball but attendance by the 15-30 crowd (or whatever the fuck ManfredMann is going after) isn’t going to double by speeding up the game in these tiny increments. Or any increments. Or by starting every inning with the bases loaded and whatever these ridiculous scenarios are. He’s throwing bandaids at problems that do not exist.

In fact I think he’s catering too much to the 20somethings with all the loud music and t-shirt cannons and all that distraction shit. I get people bring their kids and you need slides and stuff to keep young Billy entertained. That’s great. Dot races, weenie runs, sure. But leave the GAME alone for the actual fans that are going to the games and stop catering to a demographic that isn’t going to come in droves anyway. If anything he’s going to drive away the people that care the most about the game.

I never got a chance to comment on the Katie Irving head in the flat earth sand but Warrior fans better be ready for a potential championship with humongous spimning cutouts of the earth…and I actually thought Irving was one of the smarter players in the league…who was the nfl player that Jimmy Kimmel took to a dinosaur museum and the cat said he did not believe in dinosaurs and it was just all made up????

I don’t know if any of the rule changes are worth it, I understand that batters step out for no reason, but other times when there is a strike called that clearly was nort a strike the player sometimes need to step out to relax, or keep from telling the ump what a shitty call that was. So where do you draw the line to keep the batter in the bow. Same with a pitcher who constantly asks for a new ball on every pitch or the pitcher walks off the mound after every pitch to rub up the ball. No way to be consistent. But having the umps, all imps call balls and strikes the same, I think that should happen!!

looked like the O guy was doing all the talking. Only saw last 5 minutes or so, tough game to lose.
I know moore has done some good things but looked like Rabb was open on the screen and rolls and didn’t get the ball in time.

I heard on 95.7 tonight that last year there were 900+ something intentional walks total in both leagues. That means this new rule that makes intentionals automatic will save, at best, one minute of game time per week, per team. Idiotic…

This ibb change must be a matter of perceived down time, not real delay. Kids probably get bored watching four wide ones. They click away. See what’s up on some other channel, some other tab. Given MLB s astounding swath of IT property, maybe they know what they’re doing, financially. It’s bad for the game, though. I think we all agree on that point.